Applications and processes can start automatically on login on macOS, and there are a number of different ways to enable or disable auto-launching code. For example, a user could check for apps in System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items. However, this does not show all auto-starting code. Even popular apps, such as Spotify, [1] might not appear in System Preferences. Another idea is to check the common directories /Library/Launch* ~/Library/Launch*; however, these are not guaranteed to contain the auto-launching code either. [2]

Check for auto-launching code on macOS by running launchctl list, for example:

launchctl list | grep -v '\tcom.apple.'

Even though the command above filters out code identified with Apple (com.apple.), some results may still be core macOS code. Note that some identifiers may be prefixed with application, and these should probably be ignored. Check for macOS code that does not have a com.apple.* identifier, by searching the /System/Library/Launch* directories—which are part of macOS and protected by System Integrity Protection (SIP)—as follows:

ls -a /System/Library/Launch* | grep -v '^com.apple.'

If a service shown using the launchctl list command—let’s say it is called com.example.launch-service—is not a macOS service and should be disabled, then run the following command to prevent it from launching on the next login:

launchctl disable gui/`id -u`/com.example.launch-service

In order to see the full list of disabled services, [3] run:

launchctl print-disabled user/`id -u`

For more information on using launchctl on macOS, there is a blog post by Babo D called “LAUNCHCTL 2.0 SYNTAX” from 2016. [4] In addition to seeing code that starts automatically, it may also be interesting to inspect the kernel extensions that have been loaded using the kextstat.

Putting this all together, a bash alias called help combines all of these steps in order to quickly check for auto-launching code (as well as kernel extensions):

alias help="kextstat | awk '"'!'"/ com.apple./{print \$6}' ; \
launchctl list | grep -v '\tcom.apple.' ; \
echo 'usage: launchctl disable gui/\`id -u\`/com.example.launch-service' ; \
ls -a /Library/Launch* ~/Library/Launch* "

Note: Updated on Feb 28, 2021 to properly escape the ! in the bash alias.